Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

*There is a word list below the script. The list includes blue colored words which are in the script.

(27) Now, I know you’re asking, “How are we going to solve real world problems in games?” Well, that’s what I have devoted my work to over the past few years, at The Institute For The Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future. What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win.

(28) I’m just going to very briefly show you three games that I’ve made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. So, this is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real, and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, you tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news, videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what’s not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there is rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos.

(29) We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we’ve tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we’re supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive,” most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.

(30) So, for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher: bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global ExtinctionAwareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team — you’ve got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. (Laughter)

(31) But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, “Everybody’s on the dream team, and it’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net.” We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google “Superstruct,” and see.

(32) So, finally, the last game, we’re launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game you will be certified by the World Bank Institute, as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We’ve got a graphic novel, we’ve got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world.

(33) So, I’m going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We’ve got all these amazing gamers, we’ve got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning.

(34) I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. And that’s my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So, I say: Let the world-changing games begin. Thank you. (Applause)

Let’s talk about the article base on the questions below.

Viewpoints or discussion

Which games that were mentioned in the discussion do you want to play? World Without Oil, Superstruct, and the last one made by the World Bank Insitute.

If you were given the chance to invent a game, what would it be? Explain the structure or plot of the game.

After reading this TED discussion, do have any new learnings about playing games? Do you believe that playing games can save the world?

WORDS

(27)banner /ˈbænə(r)/ noun, a long piece of cloth with a message on it that is carried between two poles or hung in a public place to show support for sth:

relate /rɪˈleɪt/ verb 1 [VN] ～ A (to B) show or make a connection between two or more things ◇In the future, pay increases will be related to productivity.